Ferdinando Agresta
Fabio Cesare Campanile
Nereo Vettoretto
Editors

2014

An Evidence-Based Guide

“Long Branch, NJ – United States, 1990. It must have been the end of March; I was a junior surgical resident, making rounds, as every day, on the many patients in the service. It looked like an ordinary day at Monmouth Medical Center; Dr Mark Schwartz, one of the attending surgeons of the Department, just had returned from Tennessee where he attended his training course on laparoscopic cholecystectomy. I will always remember what he stated that day: ‘Shortly, every cholecystectomy will be done by laparoscopy’, and also I will always remember that I thought he was joking! I knew that he and some other attending physicians from Monmouth went to Nashville, where two surgeons, Reddick and Olsen, were teaching this new technique, but I believed that it was some kind of niche surgery, almost an oddity, not something meant to replace the most common operation in abdominal surgery.